Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.<\/p>\n
The “important milestone,” as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 percent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.<\/p>\n
By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine percent in the same time — although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube and Google Maps.<\/p>\n
Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 percent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.<\/p>\n
Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.<\/p>\n
In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail’s format.<\/p>\n
Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.<\/p>\n